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Olark launches "Targeted Chat"
- mvkel 14y agoOlark has, by far, affected our ability to communicate with prospects. Instead of sitting in the dark, passively mulling over Analytics numbers, we can put our finger on the pulse of a potential customer. We have several productive chats per day; if nothing else, they reinforce the decisions we're making, or provide great feedback on what we can do better.
- bcx 14y agoThanks :-). What can we do to make Olark even better for you?
- mjpizz 14y agoIt warms my heart to hear that :) Chat has built so many relationships for us too, and you just get much richer feedback (or praise!) from a "real" back-and-forth discussion with a customer.
- bemmu 14y agoWhat's your business and what kind of chats are you having?
- burningion 14y agoAgreed. It's a great way to bootstrap the initial conversations with customers, and to find out just what, exactly, your customers are looking for. With the right approach, this really is a huge leg up in customer acquisition in the early stages of a startup.
- alphadog 14y agoReminds me of LiveZilla's visitor monitoring. It's a pity I had to give up LiveZilla because of its terrible UX.
- sandstrom 14y agoLooks great! Somewhat similar to what intercom.io is doing, but I think Olark is further ahead on the chat technology. I'll be interesting to see how this sector plays out!
- massarog 14y agoIs this just proactive chat which snapengage already offers?
- nbashaw 14y agoGood question! We already had a feature called "greeter" that was on par with snapengage's proactive chat. Targeting is something bigger. Targeted chat lets you take a variety of actions other than just automatically starting conversations (label visitor, hide chatbox, show chatbox, route to operator/group) based on a wider variety of conditions about the user (too many to list here). Take it for a spin and let me know if you have any more questions! Always happy to help.
- massarog 14y agoAnyway to make it so that if a user tries to abandon our shopping cart by clicking back or X out of the page the chat box will popup asking if they need any help?
- nik_0_0 14y agoDo you really want to override browser functionality? I could imagine more people being frustrated by that than the additional sales it may generate. From the demo, they offer a rule based on referring and current URL (you may be able to use this in order to determine if a user has already pressed back). Nothing I can see regarding closing the window, your best bet may be to use the given example: "number of seconds user is on page".
- noelwelsh 14y agoScaling is the issue I have with things like Olark. One-to-one chat is an expensive way to get customers. Does anyone have experiences on the effectiveness and cost of customer acquisition using something like Olark? [Let me say I love the concept of Olark. I'm just not sure how it plays out in practice.]
- callmeed 14y agoWe brought on a dedicated sales guy last month and he's been using Olark. It's been successful and he's made sales right from the chat window. We get about 300 uniques a day and he hasn't been overwhelmed at all. The biggest issue (IMO) is making the distinction between sales and support. We don't use Olark for support (and don't want to). But for sales, it's awesome.
- bcx 14y agoNoel, If the cost of offering chat is < value you get from chat it works out. The trick is to understand that equation for your business. We launched targeted chat to help you focus your chats on just particular visitors. One could argue that the value talking to customers who land on your pricing page, while ignoring everyone else always works out.
- pbreit 14y agoI don't understand this sentiment. I would kill to be able to talk to prospective customers.
- oz 14y agoIt depends on your business. I'm not an Olark user, but I've been running some back of the envelope calculations. One year of the Bronze plan, at $180, is several orders of magnitude lower than my average customer lifetime value, so it's easily worth it, even if it only gains me 1 customer per year. Your mileage may vary. But right now, most of my customers are coming through my email marketing, so I won't signup now. But I definitely will in a few months.
- lukevdp 14y ago
- bill-nordwall 14y agoSmall bug: the fixed-position "See Plans & Pricing" link that shows up at the bottom of the page when you scroll is partially hidden by the fixed-position "Talk to Us" link when the browser window is narrower than 1245px or so.
- latchkey 14y agoI had Olark on my site for a brief period to try it out. I really like the functionality that it provides and I think they are doing a great job. That said, I ended up removing it after finding that the javascript service was rather unreliable and would cause delays for the loading of my site. I'm sure it was just a brief outage or whatever, but it does me no good if I can't get my pages to load. I'll probably revisit it in the future as olark definitely had the best product out of all of them. The integration with jabber is key.
- mjpizz 14y agoMatt here: I work on a lot of our JS here at Olark - would love to dig into any loading issues you saw! We spent a lot of time ensuring that our latest stuff loads async (http://www.olark.com/spw/2011/10/lightningjs-safe-fast-and-asynchronous-third-party-javascript/ http://www.olark.com/spw/2011/10/lightningjs-safe-fast-and-a...) so it'd be great to ensure that we're actually succeeding there :) Feel free to come on over and chat, or shoot an email to support[at]olark.com
- latchkey 14y agoIt wasn't the async stuff. It was more like olark##.olark-server.com not responding randomly which would cause my page load to block waiting for the server to respond. Probably just a server down or temporary outage, but it was enough to shake my trust a bit and just remove it since we were just starting out with it.
- mjpizz 14y agoAh, how long ago? This kind stuff should be resolved in the latest editions. We load all those requests async now, and recently we started pre-loading a few of them to improve performance further. If you have any more details, shoot 'em over. Thanks for keeping us accountable!
- bcx 14y agoI am not sure how long ago you tried Olark out, but we've made a lot of improvements in how the RPC servers work. I am still a little concerned about a slow request blocking your page though. What's your URL? Do you know if you are using JSONP?
- snprbob86 14y agoThe surprise and delight that users express when they realize a human is on the other end of that chat window makes Olark worth every penny!
- biot 14y agoDoes Olark do something different than other chat providers to indicate that a human is on the other end?
- rogerbinns 14y agoNo. But if there are no humans available it will ask you to leave a message. I've used olark as a user several times and always been delighted - the person you talk to is usually one of the techies so you can get straight down to the issues. At my current startup I insisted we use olark and have been very happy.
- snprbob86 14y agoOlark lets me use my normal chat client via Jabber or GTalk. It provides a !command interface. Most (all?) of the other systems require a special application.
- dangrossman 14y agoI tried Olark once long, long ago and had multiple problems with it -- if there were more than 10 simultaneous visitors on my sites, which there usually were, the whole thing would get wonky and send me the wrong chat info or overlap conversations from different people... I don't remember the details, except that it didn't work. And that wasn't with trying to talk to more than 10 people at once, just having more than 10 on the site. I switched to SnapEngage, which also has a proactive chat feature that lets you automatically initiate chats on certain URLs and such. It just worked and, I think, was cheaper too... been using it ever since. I don't actually spend many hours online available to chat, so most of the time the little widget in the corner of the page says "Live Support Offline" and clicking it pops up a contact form instead of a chat. I get mails from that every day, where almost nobody used the contact form built into the websites. It's worth the $19/month just for that. I'm assuming Olark has long fixed those issues I ran into, but I've no reason to want to switch back now.
- steiza 14y agoZach from Olark here, sorry to hear you were having issues some time ago! Honestly, I'm not sure what could have been causing issues for you back then, but rest assured we take message delivery extremely seriously - whenever you're using Olark if you ever have any issues please let us know so we can dive in to the logs and take a look! Most of our users routinely have many, many more than 10 simultaneous visitors - I can assure you we work in that case. : )
- prezjordan 14y agoI use Olark for my hobby programming blog - http://programthis.net http://programthis.net and I love it. Problem is that I don't have my account set up on my work computer, but when I'm home I love chatting with readers. They've got a neat product, and this is an exciting change to see.
- aflinik 14y agoCompetition lets you chat from the mobile app, you should check it out.
- bryanh 14y agoWe at Zapier love Olark. Rarely a day goes by where we don't proclaim to each other our undying love for all that is Olark. Its invaluable. Oddly enough, it is one of the most expensive SaaS apps we pay for, and if they doubled prices, we'd still pay for it. One humble request: a REST API that just spits out recent conversations. Basically a JSON version of https://www.olark.com/transcripts https://www.olark.com/transcripts. Lots of Zapier customers want to send their Olark transcripts into service X, Y, or Z but without that endpoint we can't... [1] Keep it up guys. :-) [1] Well, they could use your email feature to send it to our inbound address.. but that isn't intuitive at all.
- bcx 14y agoIf you guys create a tutorial for [1] we'll promote it on our blog and twitter. To do the json version of http://www.olark.com/transcripts http://www.olark.com/transcripts we'd need to expose an Oauth endpoint and do a few other things that would probably take a while :-) (Also have you looked at http://www.olark.com/help/webhooks http://www.olark.com/help/webhooks )
- bryanh 14y agoWasn't aware of the webhook integration. Very cool! I think we can use that.
- twakefield 14y agoHmm, I wanted to try this but I don't see the "Seconds spent on current page" filter. Is it only available w/ certain plans?
- corkill 14y agoSuper useful, just trying it out. Using it inside my web app and so want to pop up a chat when the user is on the settings page. e.g. clientname.app.com/settings, anyway to do this? I tried */settings but no luck. I also think it would be useful if I can say if the client visits any page 5 times start a chat (not a specific page). Also is their a way I can exclude all the people that are already users of my app from a rule, as I use the chat both on website and in the app.
- nbashaw 14y agoNathan from Olark here - make sure you give us the full URL (e.g., "http://clientname.app.com/settings http://clientname.app.com/settings). That should fix your issue. The second rule you wanted to use probably can't happen just yet, but we'll look into adding it! The third rule you can do if you use our Javascript API: www.olark.com/developer Thanks for the feedback, and you can always email us at support@olark.com if you have any other questions!
- corkill 14y agoThanks, the client name is dynamic, if a wildcard could be used it would help. btw anyone not using this to get feedback from their app users is missing out!
- daniellemswank 14y agoDanielle from Olark here. I'm one of the engineers on this project. We have a "contains" selector that works like a wildcard. So in order to do what you want, your rule conditions would look like: "Current Url" "contains" "settings".
- pbreit 14y agoFor some reason, Olark tabs really bug me as a user. They seem extremely intrusive and distracting sliding in on every page and invariably blocking content.
- grhino 14y agoIsn't the look of Olark customizable? I guess it depends upon how much work you want to put into it.
- pbreit 14y agoI started looking but didn't find much. And wasn't sure what was possible in the free tier. I'm not a big fan really of any of the support tabs and am sorry they have gained so much traction (thanks UserVoice, I guess?). But thankfully they are not present on the more legit sites.
- bcx 14y agoAbove the free tier you can start Olark hidden, and show it only when a "live chat" link is clicked. Shopify (one of our customers) does just this.
- moe 14y agoYou are not alone. I hate them with passion, just as those sticky sidebars. When I need support then I'll go looking for it. For that case, please have a visible link somewhere in the header or footer. There is absolutely no need to stick your 200x400px "SUPPORT!!!"-link into my face permanently. Many of them even perform idiotic gymnastics during scrolling or accidental mouseovers, in order to maximize the distraction. However, there's one thing even worse than that: Automatic chat popups (Hello Rackspace!). If you're at the receiving end of such a popup and get some really nasty text from a stranger, then that's probably me.
- bdimcheff 14y agoYou can hide the widget by default and then show it with javascript when the user clicks a link/image/etc.
- zaroth 14y agoNow coming to HN... YC company ads are now auto-upvoted to be the top story? Yes, Olark is neat for some applications, I use it on one of my sites. But I am surprised to see this as the #1 story today.
- flatline3 14y agoOr, build it yourself very easily (I did so in a weekend) using XMPP + Strophe.js: http://strophe.im/ http://strophe.im/
- ktr 14y agoAny interest in sharing the code?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- BryanB55 14y agoWe use the same feature on livechatinc.com and it works great. Olark has done a great job but I must say livechatinc wins my vote because you can see what people are typing before they hit "send" - its a big help in responding faster to questions.
- webwanderings 14y agoI visited Olark's site today for the first time and not sure why, but oddly enough, now whenever I read my HN feed in Google Reader, my Ghostry is blocking Olark. Olark should have nothing to do with Google Reader and HN. I wonder, what kind of cookie mess I am in.
- acobot 14y agoCan you sit before your computer for 24x7? If not, please try http://acobot.com http://acobot.com .
- frankdenbow 14y agoI really love Olark, it has helped me close quite a few sales since I am always on IM. I've had the best customer interactions through their widget, pumped to try this out.
- selvan 14y agoSounds interesting..I have come across " Nudgespot - http://www.nudgespot.com http://www.nudgespot.com " recently. They are focused on "How to nudge window shoppers of your ecommerce site with targeted promotions to increase conversion rate".
- dscrd 14y agoAs a customer I hate those things. Doesn't everybody?
- bullcrab 14y agoguys I understand this site has a tendency to like all y combinator companies. But all other plyers in the space do already have that feature. so this is bs.